Safe sex or Russian roulette?

The discrepancy between what university students know about safe sex and what they do is staggering. In the past decade, statistics from the Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections shows that new cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have been going up, and young people between 16 and 24 years old are most at risk. In the UK in 2009, of all women diagnosed with chlamydia 88% were under the age of 25, with 73% of cases of gonorrhoea being in women under the age of 25. For men in the same year 41% of gonorrhoea cases and 69% of chlamydia cases were in individuals under the age of 25.

Yet many young people don't take the one step that could prevent them from becoming infected with these infections, including HIV - that is, use a condom.

Why not? One frequent reason is the belief that one's partner would be insulted or think less of you if you insisted on using a condom.

Survey suggests otherwise

However, a study by communications experts suggests this may not be so. John Hocking and his colleagues in the department of speech communication at the University of Georgia in the US found that a person who insists on a condom is most often perceived as responsible and caring. The relationship can also benefit, they found, if a partner insists on condom use. Both male and female subjects tended to view a relationship as closer, more intimate and more likely to last when their partners insisted on using a condom. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescence.

Hocking and his colleagues designed a role-playing scenario in which each participant imagined he or she was going to have sex with a new partner for the first time. The students visualised how they met, what they were wearing on the night that sex was likely to occur, even whether they both enjoyed the film on their fantasy date or not.

The students did not know that condom use was the focus of the study until they were randomly assigned to a group that either insisted on condom use or didn't. (In order to remove all possibility that a condom was used for birth control, researchers told the subjects that the woman was taking an oral contraceptive.)

After the role-playing, the 87 men and 103 women, ranging in age from 18 to 30, were surveyed to learn their feelings about their character in the scenario, their partner, the relationship and how they thought the partner felt about them.
On average the students whose partners insisted on using a condom said they felt safer and had less regret about the encounter than those who didn't. (Interestingly, the sex of the person who suggested using a condom wasn't found significant.)